Here's one of my newer connections, nephew Mason. Even though he's exhausted his father, he's still cuddling up while watching "Adventure Time" with the rest of us.I had a wonderful time talking to Shaun Duke and Jen Zink of the Skiffy and Fanty Show last week. The podcast is up here. If you enjoy it and use iTunes, show them a little love with a rating on there.
A reason the interview wa so enjoyable was that they asked really interesting, incisive questions about the stories in Near + Far, in that way a writer desires and dreads at the same time, where they’re seeing some of your psyche’s underpinnings shaping the stories that you create. I’ve been mulling over some of those questions since then, and was thinking about one on the bus home the other day.
They pointed to many of the stories being about the need for connection, with characters like the protagonist of “Angry Rose’s Lament” being addicted to a drug that makes him feel connected, the hero of “Therapy Buddha” projecting all his needs onto a toy, or Sean Marksman’s ultimate fate in “Seeking Nothing.” Going through other stories in my head, I see the theme of connection coming up in various forms throughout. I think that’s a basic human need, one born of monkey roots, an instinct to be with the other monkeys.
Connection’s been something I’ve sought throughout my life. I was a brainy and isolated child, and still am to some extent. NowadaysI work in a profession that requires stretches of isolation in order to produce. So I value my time spent with other people, and particularly writers and likeminded people. I know that I’m happiest when I’ve got a group of interesting and lovely friends doing wonderful things and setting the world afire, just as I know that without some of them I would be a much different person.
Still, it’s not something I’m alone in exploring, as a writer. Human connections — gone awry, gone swimmingly, mistaken or acute, agape or philia or eros — are what fiction is made of.
At a panel at this year’s Worldcon, a fellow panelist got quite huffy when I mentioned the idea that fiction teaches us about being human. He found the idea outmoded and far too 19th century. Perhaps the divergence lay in our conceptions of what the word “teach” means — and perhaps “demonstrates” or “discusses” would be a better verb there, but I don’t know. We’re all just flailing about trying to fit into our own particular monkey packs and we’re watching the other monkeys to see what they’re doing and what we’re supposed to be doing. Don’t we read fiction to find some of that information? Perhaps we don’t say to ourselves, “I will be like character X in Book Y,” but we do think about heroes. We try to be better human beings sometimes because we have their examples. Or perhaps to avoid whatever fictional fate they fell prey to.
So, yeah. Connections. In fiction, the connections between characters, the way they choose to interpret word or gesture or telepathic scream. In the absence of human (or perhaps, intelligent, rather than human) connection, they make imaginary ones, creating fiction within fiction. That’s one of the things I’m looking at in the book I’m currently working on, focusing on the connections between the main character and the beings around her. It’s let me plunge into her head in a way I haven’t before, and I’m enjoying the heck out of it, connecting with her.
As a professional student of humanity, I agree with you that fiction – story, really – does teach us about being human, and that we seek it out for that reason. If anything we need it more than in the 19th century. We never stop because we are living in a constantly shifting environment as our technology changes the ways we interact and bring us into increasingly larger social spheres yet isolate at the same time.
I recently read a great book called ‘The Storytelling Animal’ by Jonathan Gottschall. He lays out all the best neurological and evolutionary arguments for our drive to tell and consume story in a compelling way (he uses story).
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Zen and the Art of Spiral-Carved Incense Burners
A stone lantern sits along the pathway, waiting to be sold to a Kadian merchant.This essay originally appeared in the February 2001 issue of Imaginary Realities. The crafting system in Armageddon is something we worked towards for a long time. The implementation may not have been the most efficient (I still, vividly, remember making hundreds of arrow objects so we could have them with every possible color combination of fletching) but getting it into the game was a huge source of satisfaction.
One of the desires expressed at the very first Armageddon player-staff meeting I ever attended was a yen to move away from “a hack and slash economy,” where players made their income by selling the gear off NPCs (and the occasional PC) that they had killed. How, one immortal noted, could the world be realistic when there was no coded reflection of the material underpinnings of it? How to create this economic reflection was a question that remained in the air for several years, and it was not until discussion of implementing crafting code came up that such a move seemed possible.
We laid the groundwork for crafting by first creating ways to get the raw materials. I reviewed what was produced from skinning the various creatures in the game, both to make sure that players could skin most corpses and to ensure that what was being produced was reasonable. We implemented skinning difficulty: some things, such as pelts, are harder to extract from a corpse, as opposed to cuts of meat. Beyond that, we added a forage command, allowing players to find rocks and wood. Later, this was expanded to add other arguments: artifacts, salt, and roots. Forageable objects differ according to the sector type of the room and in order to make this reflect geographical differences, we added some more sector types, such as thornlands, salt flats, and ruins. Salt can only be foraged in the salt flats, for example, and roots are only available in fertile land (hard to find on a desert planet).
Once the ability to gather raw materials was in place, a couple of initial crafting skills were implemented: basket weaving and tanning. Basket weaving, admittedly, started out as a bit of a joke, but it served its purpose: to allow us to discover flaws. Both skills necessitated the creation of the objects to be crafted: a series of baskets for basket weaving, and tanned versions of various pelts and hides. With each, I tried to make sure there were incentives to use the skill: tanning a hide made it both more valuable as well as sometimes adding wear flags, while baskets included some objects that were wearable on the back or otherwise handy. I included the ability to craft an object, a numut vine sash, that had vanished from the game when the city of its origin was destroyed, and this in turn led me to wander through the database to find other objects that could be recycled and used for the code. As part of this effort, I ended up adding a component crafting skill for the magic users in the game in order to use a series of objects left over from an immortal project that had never been fully finished.
Although some objects could be recycled in this fashion, many others had to be made for the crafting code as we began to implement additional skills, including bow making, knife making, cooking, dyeing, leather working, bandage making, etc. Occasionally, obsessiveness got the better of me: after creating four different types of arrowheads, I decided that people should be able to make striped fletching for their arrows, so they could, if they wished, make arrows using their clan or House colors. This required me making some 300 or so arrow objects in a madcap building session that left me not wanting to ever type the word “arrow” again. Here, planning out the entire effort in detail ahead of time and having used a different structure for coding the items would have paid off, instead of having added bit by bit as I went along. For example, I found myself regretting the variety of gems one could forage in the game when I ended up making multiple bone dagger items, each with a different gemstone in the hilt. Having the entire structure sketched out ahead of time, rather than adding in skills as they occurred, might have been helpful, although some of the skills came from player suggestions after they’d been exposed to the new code.
As the skills began to be more fleshed out, we started making them available to the players. Cooking was a skill everyone got, while others were fitted into the skill trees (Armageddon has a branching system) where appropriate, with merchants ending up the vast beneficiaries overall, going from a possible 13 skills to 38. Some additional skills grew out of the effort, such as analyze, which allows a player to determine an item.s component parts, and armor repair.
At the same time, we added a secondary guild system, which allowed players to flesh out their backgrounds further, by adding a few skills, usually crafting. The secondary guilds were not the same as the regular guilds but intended to reflect life experiences or talents, including stone worker, bard, house servant, guard and mercenary, and I enjoyed putting the packages together in a way that made sense, such as giving the house servants pilot, flower arranging, and a high cooking skill or the mercenaries ride, knife-making and an increase in their ability to hold their liquor.
Inevitable questions and problems arose. On Armageddon, skilled merchants can often identify the style of an item via the value command, if it came from a specific region or culture, and in order to accommodate this, I made the crafting of some items dependent on materials available to only those groups. Shopkeepers began to be glutted with some items (nothing is sadder than a Kadian merchant laden with nothing but spiral-carved green marble incense burners), but this allowed us to check and adjust item prices by monitoring the shops to see what items were appearing at what costs.
For example, since wood is more expensive in Allanak than in the Northlands, some players were cashing in wildly by making and selling wooden spears to House Salarr, which I hadn’t realized would happen till I noticed them selling for 300 sid (Armageddon uses obsidian for its coinage) in the shops.
The experiment still continues and new items, many contributed by players, are added every few weeks. Currently, there are some 3000+ possibilities, crafting wise, coded, and there are still gaps. When I initially did the dyes, for example, I left out the color orange, which means that I keep getting inquiries about implementing variations with that color from the players. The fact that it would require writing up another 300 or so objects has stopped me so far, however. But the players are using the code right and left, and some are actually supporting their characters with it. Though there is still a limited market for incense burners.
Two down comforters were draped over them as well; Nicholas could not sleep without their weight on him, while Feniker, who seemed to burn with a furnace's metabolism, would inevitably throw most of them off during the night, onto Nicholas.(Another excerpt from the story I’m currently working on.)
Nicholas woke slowly. It was chilly in the room, and when he shifted his body between the clinging flannel sheets, he could encounter zones of warmth and cool. Two down comforters were draped over them as well; Nicholas could not sleep without their weight on him, while Feniker, who seemed to burn with a furnace’s metabolism, would inevitably throw most of them off during the night, onto Nicholas.
He could hear Feniker’s soft breathing, a burry almost snore, a sound so uniquely Fen that it tugged a smile onto Nicholas’s lips, knowing what his lover’s face looked like when sleep-slackened, how it must look right now. He had drawn the drapes across the windows; the hotel’s front looked out onto the plaza, but Nicholas had opted for one of the less ostentatious back chambers which he secretly thought more pleasant, overlooking the back gardens, which were the more handsome vista, even when leaf-deprived and blackened by the cold, due to the green cedars that ringed it round.
The hotel was stirring. Soon enough his breakfast, with plenty left over for Feniker, would arrive and be deposited outside the door with a discreet knock. The hotel’s own brand of fish tea, with an odd peppery brackishness. He still wasn’t sure whether or not he liked its aftertaste, even after living in the hotel for almost two months now. He had lived with his father before then, but fire had taken their mansion, and both had taken themselves to alternate lodgings. He had chosen this hotel, which he could afford on his lavish allowance, for the way it managed to combine proximity to the student quarter with luxury.
He rolled on his side and found Feniker watching him, no longer snoring, blue eyes bright in the morning light, almost luminous.
“Good morning, sunshine,” Nicholas said. He leaned over to give Fen a kiss. Fen’s fingers tangled in his hair, drew him down to meet lips.
“What’s on your agenda for today?” Fen said.
“I am meeting with my father to go over the plans for the new factory in Cloudmarch,” Nicholas said.
“Will you be visiting it? The expedition is going through Cloudmarch. You could come out with us, say goodbye there, do whatever you needed to do with the new factory.”
“I would serve my father ill as a factory manager,” Nicholas said. “I’m not good with such things.”
“You have a mind keen enough to keep up with anyone in their classes,” Feniker said. “If you chose to exert yourself. Instead you pretend yourself slower than you are, and use it as excuse to while away your days drinking fish tea and playing cards.” He pushed himself off the bed and strode across the chamber, naked, to reclaim his clothing from the bench below the window.
Nicholas gathered the covers around himself, reluctant to lose their warmth, even in pursuit of what the kiss had promised. “What of you, what does the Duke’s secretary do today?”
Fen shrugged and drew on his trousers, sat down to pull on his boots. Behind him the window panes were laced with frost, a pattern like the ghost effluvium a professor had demonstrated at the last University lecture Nicholas had attended.
Thinking of that, he protested, “I do go to some lectures after all, and meet with Professor Wirewit to work on my paper.”
“Meetings that are few and far between,” Fen said. He caught himself. “Look, I don’t mean to nag you.”
“Will you come tonight and see a play with me?” Nicholas asked.
“I will have papers to transcribe,” Fen said. “I have been burning the candle at both ends, and I must decide where I should be spending my time. I do not mean to imply that it should not be with you, only that I would rather spend time enjoying your company, than sitting together staring down at a stage while the audience gossips so loud that we cannot hear half the lines.”
The reasonable tone, the exaggerated patience in his voice made Nicholas want to smack him.
2 Responses
As a professional student of humanity, I agree with you that fiction – story, really – does teach us about being human, and that we seek it out for that reason. If anything we need it more than in the 19th century. We never stop because we are living in a constantly shifting environment as our technology changes the ways we interact and bring us into increasingly larger social spheres yet isolate at the same time.
I recently read a great book called ‘The Storytelling Animal’ by Jonathan Gottschall. He lays out all the best neurological and evolutionary arguments for our drive to tell and consume story in a compelling way (he uses story).
I’ll have to look for that, it sounds fascinating.